Bats that eat insects should be able to taste sweet food but can’t

By Ibrahim Sawal

Bats that eat insects are unable to taste sweet foods, even though they have the genetic ability to do so.

The evolution of taste perception and diet are closely linked for many animals, but in some cases this link is unclear. Different species of bat have highly diverse diets, ranging from nectar to insects and even blood, despite having similar taste receptor genes.

To discover more, Huabin Zhao at Wuhan University in China and his colleagues sequenced two sweet taste receptor genes in 34 bat species. They found that all …